On Fox News earlier this week, President Donald Trump couldn’t resist the chance to snipe at the media — one of his favorite targets. Saying that he wouldn’t kick the media out of the White House, as has been mentioned before, he warned:
“Some people in the press will not be able to get in because there’s just too many. We have to just pick the people to go into the room,” he said and then turned on the sarcasm: “I’m sure other people will be thrilled about that.”
Trump loves his fake news, he Does
And that just tickles Jim Hoft, founder of the Gateway Pundit blog. At Thursday Night’s DeploraBall (ha ha). he claimed that Trump’s team had awarded the Pundit with a White House credential, The Washington Post’s Callum Borchers reports.
He notes:
“I say ‘claimed’ because Hoft is an appallingly unreliable source of information (more on that in a moment) and because Trump folks have not responded to my request for confirmation . To be fair,” he said, “they’ve been kinda busy.”
But Hoft has been in brag mode lately.
“During the election, I had a million readers a day at the Gateway Pundit,” Hoft told DeploraBall participants at the Press Club. “Thank you. And the reason was because I was telling the truth. We’ve been in contact with the Trump administration, and they’re going to do something different, and we got their word that The Gateway Pundit is going to have a White House correspondent this year.”
Borchers recalls a particularly absurd story the Pundit published last week that was spawned by the social media. The Pundit claimed that the Post’s Doris Truong had somehow managed to snap cellphone photos of notes belonging to secretary of state nominee Rex Tillerson, while he was at his confirmation hearing.. But Truong wasn’t at the meeting. And it isn’t terribly smart to say she was because she’s an editor of The Post’s website.
And Twitter trolls rose to the occasion with their amazing powers of short-sidedness and gullibility. They saw an Asian woman with a cellphone near Tillerson’s notes and decided without any evidence whatsoever, that this was Truong, because after all, Truong is Asian-American and that makes her guilty, right?
It was enough for Hoft, anyway.
And if you peruse Snopes.com, you find a number of falsehoods promoted by The Gateway Pundit and other such sites.
Here’s a couple of examples:
Just a couple of days after the election, the Pundit and other disreputable sites ran articles that claimed paid Anti-Trump protesters were bused into San Antonio, Texas to stage a “fake protest” against Trump, Snopes.com reports. The evidence was solely based on three photographs posted to Twitter by user Eric Tucker. The Pundit insinuated — but provided no evidence whatsoever — that somehow this “protest” was funded by billionaire George Soros. And it also didn’t see protesters getting on or off the bus, yet it based all of the evidence on Tucker’s photos.
Snopes noted that while Tucker’s photos are indeed real, and that yes, an anti-Trump protest did take place in San Antonio on November 9, 2016, the protest and the bus photos are in no way connected. Instead, the buses, which contained some 11,000 people were headed to a Tableau Conference, which was taking place at the same time, noted station KTBC.
And the station reports:
“The charter buses were lined up along 5th Street near Waller in Downtown, the closest point to the rally would have been Congress Avenue, which is about a mile away. The protest started on the West Mall at the UT campus, about three miles away. Down the street about a half-mile is Austin Convention Center. Local businesses say they’ve seen the charter buses at the location prior to the election.”
The station followed that up by interviewing Kate Lyons, a Portland, Oregon woman who was attending the convention.
“It’s growing every year, five years ago it started with 250 people, now it was 13,000 attendees in person.” She added that charter buses are used for the event. They sold out all the hotels downtown and they ended up having to send people to hotels that were outside the radius of the conference and sent buses out to ship people around for that. We saw them from day one, which was Monday.”
And Twitter user Timothy Dillon noted this:
@RaeOnFOX7 @fox7austin I was personally loading passengers on the buses. When protests stalled the route, attendees de-boarded and walked.
— Timothy W. Dillon (@timothywdillon) November 11, 2016
Then Tucker noted in a blog post that he might have been wrong, saying he didn’t really know what the buses were being used for, but assumed they were being used for the protests because that was the only major event he knew about at that time.
Once he realized he was wrong, he posted this on Twitter:
And BOOM! The old big bad post is gone! Its memory shall live on! Thanks all! Let's keep the conversation moving! https://t.co/DHz37Le9i8 pic.twitter.com/YME1TN4q4D
— erictucker (@erictucker) November 12, 2016
Snopes ruled this claim by the Pundit as false.
Related: ‘YOU ARE FAKE NEWS’ – Watch Donald Trump Go Berserk On CNN’s Senior White House Correspondent
The Gateway Pundit can’t take all the blame for this next story that Snopes reports is also false. Fox News’ Neil Cavuto is partly responsible for this whopper. In this instance, Cavuto was apparently aghast that President Obama allegedly encouraged undocumented immigrants to vote illegally. That’s when the Pundit jumped in, calling the remarks “criminal,” and then firing off several other missives:
“Barack Obama openly called on illegal aliens to vote in Tuesday’s election. This whole administration is lawless!”
“They lie at every turn.
“They lied to get Obamacare passed.
“They lied about Benghazi.
“They lied about Hillary’s private server and emails.
“And now they are calling on illegal aliens to vote.”
These inaccurate statements stem from an interview with President Obama on November 3, in which actress Gina Rodriguez asked Obama about issues facing young Latinos. A number of the outrage posts are based on a video in which Obama’s statements are heavily edited to give the misleading impression that Obama was encouraging undocumented workers to vote illegally.
Below is the heavily edited video:
[brid video=”108418″ player=”5260″ title=”Obama encourages illegal aliens to vote without fear of being deported.”]
But the full, unedited interview tells a different story. Obama can be heard urging Latino citizens to vote, so that members of their community, including those who are undocumented, will have a voice. Nowhere in the unedited video does he encourage them to vote illegally.
You can watch this video to find out what Obama really said.
[brid video=”108419″ player=”5260″ title=”EXCLUSIVE Gina Rodriguez Interviews President Obama mit”]
As Borchers notes, “telling the truth” isn’t what The Gateway Pundit does. However:
“If you have a conspiracy theory or a hoax you want to spread, Hoft is your guy.”
It will be interesting to see if indeed Trump did invite this site to the White House. As Borchers notes, the Trump team hasn’t commented on that as yet. And if this is true, will the Pundit present Trump in an unflattering light? In light of how Republicans fought Obama every step of the way, this would only be fair.
You can watch Jim Hoft brag his way through the video below:
[brid video=”108421″ player=”5260″ title=”Jim Hoft Gateway Pundit will be in Trump’ White House”]
Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images
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